Year: 2007
-
-
The Sunday Poem: The Cat Came Back and Back and Back and Back
This is probably my kids’ favorite song. I didn’t write it, of course; credit there goes to a guy named Harry S. Miller, in 1893. But it’s one of those songs that won’t die. A lot of kids come to it via the singalong version in Rise Up Singing: The Group Singing Songbook, which is kind of the default carry-around folk fakebook used around campfires. Some kids of a different vintage might remember the Muppets version.
As with many of the tunes that have gone through the folk process, the melody exists in many different versions as well. I am positive that the version I do bears little resemblance to the original. And of course, once I learned that there were a lot of different versions out there, I had to go out and scour the Internet for all the verses I could find. What I found far exceeded the cat’s official quota of nine lives. And then, of course, I had to add my own.
Read More “The Sunday Poem: The Cat Came Back and Back and Back and Back”
-
When your bugs go WAY public
If I were a developer on Saint’s Row, I’d be both amused and slightly humiliated. 🙂 Buggy Saints Row: The Musical.
-
More on ‘flation and the future
This post starts out being about very gamey things like damage per second, and ends up on a speculative note. So if you’re the sort who comes here for stuff about social virtual worlds, read on, because this is relevant to you too. 🙂
Over at The Cesspit, Abalieno argues that “the mudflation from the perspective of those who build these kinds of games isn’t THE PROBLEM. The mudflation is THE SOLUTION.” The logic is simple:
- it’s inherent in the model
- consumed content leads to shared experiences, and being able to go back and see something that was once powerful and is now trivial helps that, and both of these feelings are core to the value offered by this style of game
- by rendering older content “useless” from a game point of view you re-establish the horizon for players, making the game have fresh goals
All of this is true. But…
-
Is 2007 the year of the online game?
Nabeel Hyatt has an interesting article today asking whether 2007 is the year that gaming gets greater attention in the mass media as a result of common metrics shifting off of impressions and towards time spent. He has some neat graphs showing Pogo versus YouTube on various axes, such as impressions, time spent, and a quickie ersatz “rating” he cooked up.